Tuesday, 12 April 2011

Your Soul Is Made of Money

I was musing over the state of my life the other night while trying to get to sleep, and I realised something quite profound.  I realised that every single regret I have, every missed opportunity and moment I wish I could have extended, is at heart down to a lack of money.  Money is the thing which enables life to happen in so many more ways than we like to admit to.  You have money and you are a successful citizen, you can pay your bills, improve your education and that of your children, you will dress well, eat well, travel well, experience much more of life than those without money.  I would very much like to be able to talk about the wealth of experience, spritual and otherwise, which is afforded outside of the magnetic pulse of cashflow, but I fear it is pretty much impossible in the society we have built for ourselves.  Even those who meditate can afford to take time out to stop working for enough time to transcend themselves. 

Is this right?  What are we to infer, for example, from new government policy  - that millionaire overseas businesspeople can enter the country and have normal visa requirements streteched to accommodate them, and, it seems, essentially act with impunity, simply because they have a shitload of cash - other than the clear notion that one's value is inextricable from one's wealth. 

Niall Ferguson (the most smouldering of Historian Bonfires) is currently on Channel 4 fronting a show called "Civilisation: The West vs The Rest", in which he expounds his at times bone-crunchingly honest views about the nature of empire, with the cold yet inexpressibly hot arrogance of a man of complete objectivity (so far as such a thing is possible).  This Sunday's episode, Work, discussed the Protestant Work Ethic as the driving force behind economic growth and modernisation - potentially over 30 million Chinese have moved away from Confucianism and Buddhism (less kerching! more I Ching) towards Protestantism since Mao died, for example, which, Ferguson argues, is one of the main reasons why Chinese ecomonic growth has been so consolidated and so fast, as it once was in Europe and America. 

Once you kill God then what do you have left?  You have man. 
Once you kill the primacy of the Pope, then what do you have left?  You have man as an individual. 
Damien Hirst's The Death of God - Towards a Better Understanding of Life Without God Aboard the Ship of Fools, a collection of 28 sculptures and paintings first presented at Hilario Galguera, Mexico in 2006.
"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"
—Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125

When every moment of your life is no longer controlled by edicts from On High, you must introduce a system of self-regulation, which was actually already very neatly done by the twin Protestant towers of hard work and renunciation of material wealth in order to glorify God.  Whereas Europeans used the scientific and philosophical freedoms this world eventually afforded them to experience an almighty existential crisis, the Americans kept the faith but inadvertently fell either into abject greed, or else religious extremism (see last week's post), yet China (so far at least) seems to have maintained some modicum of self-control, saving and investing and building and, subsequently, terrifying the West with its shimmering potential. 

The largest Christian church in Beijing, China http://bit.ly/g9ZhIu
So the question is this: are we content to only take the death of God so far?  I have spoken before about the beauty and ubiquity of myth, story, advernture and legend until very very recently.  The vacuousness and stale, dried-up sick on a Sunday morning vibe of modern Western Europe is such that we end up going through the motions of worship, exhausted as we all are by the compunction to work, but devoid of the glory that working for a God brings.  Guess we're all our own Gods now.

Jonny Depp as Jesus at http://www.magazine13.com/if-celebrities-were-gods/
Can we come up with something which can unite and inspire us, drive us forward into a future, rather than allow ourselves to get so far and give up?  I had a conversation with a Professor of Philospophy the other day who expounded the ontological argument - look at how complex this watch is, we musty infer a maker, look at how complex the universe is, there must also be a maker - genuinely thought we had gotten over that idea at least 250 years ago - and he represented what is true about all religion which falsely purports to belong to the Waking World.  This is what we know, they say, here is what is proved.  Here is what we do not know, they say, and this is what is God.  They pay no mind to the fact that their mentality, if shared by everyone, would have meant a complete and utter lack of scientific, humanitarian, techonological and intellectual growth.  It is only by the constant reduction of God's power (i.e. finding out that which we do not yet know) that we move forwards.  As I have said before, progress in civilisation is not a one way ticket - we can Decline and Fall just like everyone else.  We have gone so far as to realise some truths which do not necessarily make us feel comforted and cherished - the lack of specialness, the loss of the Holy Parent, whatever this may be - but it seems that we are now those embarrassing teenagers who still get into bed with mommy and daddy after a bad dream.  We should be brave enough not to regress into ever more fervent religiosity, or a rejection of the merits of science, and stand on the plateau, shaking our fists into the sky and fucking daring ourselves to be scared in the face of the truth. 

If we don't work out how to do that, then we have died in the water, like so many dead sardines or birds fallen from the sky.

Sunday, 3 April 2011

Just Everyone Pipe Down, Alright?

After having carefully delineated the separation of science and religion (you remember, science is for when you're awake and using your ruler, religion is for when you're asleep and have no access to pens), it turns out that there has been a similar line of thought happening all over the bleeding shop. 

Last week saw the final instalment in a series of lectures that I would love to have gone to called Uncertain Minds), which tried to set out with some cohesion if any common ground is possible on the increasingly more fashionable topic of religion in this smoky stew we find ourselves dodging the chunks in at the turn of the century.  (For a full review of the event see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/mar/24/uncertain-minds-uncertainty-faith) I found particularly interesting what Manchester University's own ex-Official Badass, Terry Eagleton, says about the polarising which has taken place in our society, between those who have no faith and those with too much. Here is a video of him being vague but wise: Eagleton Meaning of Life (As an interesting aside, Eagleton talks of the power of the lexicon in shaping our mental landscapes, citing the ubiquity of "like" we all use now as being indicative of a blurred, undefined cognitive realm, where we need not make anything precise.  I have thought that the use of the word "whatever" also functions in the same way, allowing us to make no judgement whatsoever if we don't feel like it.  These words make it easier to not commit to what's going on in the world.)  As Bunting says:

"Late capitalism is inherently faithless, he [Eagleton] argued, and its rationalism conditions the way we think and speak. The result is that a "shallow, technocratic managerialism pushes all deeper questions aside and abandons them to the red-neck fundamentalists"."

If we do choose to engage with the world around us (you brave souls, you) we must carve deep and thus recognisable fissures between the poles - left/right, believer/non-believer, East/West and so on (I mean, you've practically done an entire RE GCSE by reading that paragraph) - and plant ourselves firmly one side or the other. I agree that it is an interesting and perhaps unforeseen side-effect of all this globalisation that, instead of updating our palettes with ever more exquisite shades of grey, we have credit-crunched the whole paintbox to leave us with the bare minimum.  
Doris Salcedo's work Shibboleth - a 500ft crack along the length of the floor in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/dorissalcedo/leaflettext.shtm
Unfortunately, the truth is never going to be like that.  If there is nothing else that this current (UK) government has taught us (apart from representing quite a wonderfully painful and complete tableau of What Not To Be Like, Ever, As A Human Being, Not Ever) is that the crude scoring that separates ideas such as left and right is outdated, irrelevant, divisive and useless.  We are mostly so terrified of the growling juggernaut of living in a modern society that we scatter into corners, draping ourselves with our Likes and Dislikes, Star Signs and Pet Peevs, clinging to an identity which isn't necessarily the one we wanted, but hellfire! it's the one that was available.  Difference is to be celebrated, of course, we are all special unique snowflakes, I'm sure, but the ready-made opinions that we can instantly affiliate ourselves with seems to me to be so superficial as to be utterly without meaning.

So what you get is an ever-widening gap between the Believer and the Non-Believer.  The healthiest mental option, surely, of the Pick 'n' Mix Brain, the Mind at Large (learning as much of the world as you possibly can in order to make the most educated guess about where you fit in with it all) becomes increasingly difficult as this trench widens. 

There was an article in last week's New Humanist (which I must say, despite containing some irritatingly interesting articles, is on the whole one of the nastiest pieces of smug, self-congratulating arsewipe I have ever had the misfortune to not throw out of my balcony sooner - sample sentence: "The Rationalist Press Association (or RPA, founded 1899), the predecessor of the Rationalist Association, which publishes this magazine, does have a long history of publishing material sympathetic to various forms of eugenics. It’s not all bad news. There’s some comfort perhaps in the news that the key figure in the birth of eugenics was not a rationalist but a Protestant vicar." Thank God, eh boys?!) covering the new book by Olivier Roy, Holy Ignorance.  The idea is that since we (arguably rightly) decided that religion should not be the force that described our waking life, that this should be the domain of science and that which is provable, testable and is agreed upon by qualified people, we have shunted religion to the sidelines, in that it is no longer directly intertwined with everyday culture.  Whereas in many cultures the year still rotates around the upkeep of various sacred rituals, designed to connect you to your religion, in the West at least, if you can't make money out of it then better keep it to yourself, pilgrim. 
Super-ironic pro-abstinence poster
This has meant that if anyone has the misfortune to just so happen to believe in something beyond the cold facts of Reality, then they know not to share this with the world at large, but only with the select few who also share, like any kind of extreme fetish, your secret love.  As Caspar Melville comments:

"“The ‘religious revival’,” writes Roy, “is primarily about the believer’s refusal to see his world reduced to the private sphere.” The new fundamentalisms look with shock at a culture where there is no longer any evidence of their faith. They become isolated and begin to brandish the religious markers of their faith – crucifix, headscarf, Bible, faith accessories – as a demand for public recognition. In this context religion, for so long part of everyday culture, becomes strange. For the secular, people with faith are looked on as weird. Roy points to the case of the Pope – he has been wearing the same sort of garb for centuries, but is suddenly publically lampooned as a man in a dress with funny shoes."

So, it turns out that "faith" no longer means (as I took it to) a bespoke smorgasbord of your beliefs - the part of you that reacts with other than cold objectivity when a million fish dies, for example - infused with whatever else you've understood from the world of waking.  It is apparently now a wholesale rejection of everything that is rational and correct and consensually upheld.  This is why believers are idiots and must be ridiculed. 

And I'm not necessarily saying that they're not - both Christian and Muslim fundamentalism in particular are back-of-the-classroom-style sniggering culprits in this.  There is nothing more uplifting than wandering out onto Market Street in Manchester and watching the preaching Christian nutjobs (who all seem to be wearing brand new branded sweatshirts recently, and singing from expensive looking tannoy systems - it's easy to see how you gain impetus as the alternative when the other side is so bleak) getting into heated exchanges with Muslim nutjobs on the street and knowing that, whatever else might be true, their bullshit isn't. 

But what I am saying is that idiocy comes from all sides, because it comes from ignorance.  Reading some of the readers' letters in the New Humanist made my fists ball up into tiny white socks, especially when several enlightened subscribers had written in to bemoan all the Dawkins bashing that has been going on recently - "I mean, if they'd actually read The God Delusion they would know they were wrong."  Oh really?  How many of you judgmental fuckwits have read the Bible, cover to cover? The Qur'an? The Upanishads, the Rig Veda, the various Books of the Dead?  Nope, didn't think so.  Unless you have some basis to your judgements, have the good decency to keep them to yourselves, and certainly not to dismiss every person who believes not as you do as being a moron, because then, I'm afraid, you're just as bad as the shoutiest of explosiviest of rantiest of religious nuts. If St Paul's Cathedral can chair a series of debates on the existence of God, then you can all eat some non-leavened humble pie.  

Man Ray, Dust Breeding (Detail from the Large Glass by Marcel Duchamp), 1920, showing how dust accumulated on Duchamp's work.
As I have said before, and will probably say many more times, if you have in any way understood the facts of the universe as incontrovertibly proven by science, then there is no need and no time for all of this callous points-scoring.  You try your best to learn as much as you can and do with it what you can, but don't, please, start shitting on anyone else while you do it.